Reuters was temporarily forced to shut down its instant messaging service Thursday after a computer worm spread across its network. The culprit - Kelvir-U - is a variant of a worm family that targets MSN and Windows Messenger clients and previously posed no risk to Reuters' tightly-controlled messaging network. This is the first incident where a virus has targeted a privately controlled user community, IM security firm IMlogic reports.

If you think the mobile phone mast wars have been bad so far, you ain't seen nothing yet. That's according to 3G equipment and software suppliers, who estimate that if 3G is to replace GSM as planned, the networks will need three to four times as many transmitters as they have today.

Pseudo-preppie clothier Polo/Ralph Lauren has been named as the latest target in a string of data security breaches, this time involving the loss of hundreds of thousands of customer credit transactions, the Associated Press reports.

European rail operators love Wi-Fi. They're keen on anything that encourages more businesspeople to take the train, and wireless networking is an attractive way to provide paying travellers with ad hoc connections to the internet and company networks. A journey's duration becomes productive work time, whether it's part of a daily commute or a longer trip.

Prince Harry has flunked a basic computer skills test at an army induction day. The Daily Mirrorreports that the third in line to the British throne shocked instructors in failing a basic PC skills course.

The stereotype of virus writers as spotty nerds who can't pull is well wide of the mark, according to an expert on the psychology of virus writers. Sarah Gordon, senior principal research engineer at Symantec Security Response, said that the more recent idea that virus writing activity is focused mainly around money-making scams is inaccurate.

IBM could cull up to 10,000 workers to make up for a disconcerting first quarter revenue shortfall, according to a top financial analyst. The question is whether these cuts will tidy the bottom line enough to offset what appear to be broad problems plaguing the company.

With Andrew Tridgell silent, apparently on legal advice, open source community leader Bruce Perens has stepped up to defend the work Tridgell did reverse engineering the protocols used by Bitkeeper. Bitkeeper is the closed source proprietary source code management tool that until last week, Linus Torvalds used to manage Linux kernel source code.

An MIT student has had a paper consisting of computer-generated gibberish accepted by technology conference WMSCI. The pretentious gathering bills itself as "an international forum where researchers and practitioners examine Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics key issues"